To Imagine One Life, You Need Another

What has Rome become in the past ten years? Is it a door swung wide open upon an invaluable if ramshackle southern landscape, or is it the first step on the road to a new European order? Elena Stancanelli plunges into the Eternal City and brings us, not a simple report, but the "story of the city". A narrative in multiple voices, in which shacktowns and shopping malls coexist, along with leading figures in the arts scene, teenagers capable to taking their apathy to unexpected summits of sensuality, politicians who are enlightened (to varying degrees), prostitutes, soccer stars, immigrants, gypsies, left- and right-wing street thugs, hidden places and places that are incomprehensibly crowded. From the Rome of Carmelo Bene and Victor Cavallo to the Rome of Renzo Piano, from teeming slums to residential neighborhoods that could easily be in Beverly Hills, and along the way, pool halls, sexy shops, recreation centers, open-air discos… Elena Stancanelli has taken a journey through the memory, the art, and the imagination of Rome, but above all, she puts herself at risk, in person, as she takes on, unmasked, the life (and the vitality: variously languid, or ferocious, or despairing) and the encounters and the stories that keep the city going. The result is a narrative mosaic whose strongest feature is the missing tiles: not a rigid claim to totality, but instead the all-encompassing thunderstruck description of an authentic experience.